Garnier & Linker Moves Its Sculptural Lighting Outdoors, Trading Bronze for Cast Aluminium
Aurora, the French studio's first outdoor collection, reworks four existing lamp forms in cast aluminium for Paris Design Week, keeping the sculptural language of its interior pieces while rebuilding them to survive the weather.
Guillaume Garnier and Florent Linker have spent their time as a studio treating lighting as closer to sculpture than to hardware, working out of Les Granges, their studio near the Forest of Fontainebleau southeast of Paris, in materials more associated with decorative arts than lamp catalogues: alabaster, volcanic stone, bronze and plaster. Aurora, unveiled this month ahead of Paris Design Week, is the studio's first attempt at taking that language outside, and rather than inventing new shapes for the occasion, it sends four of the studio's existing indoor models back through development to survive rain, temperature swings and years outdoors.
The four pieces getting the outdoor treatment, Nezu, Kora, Teree and Thea, keep their original silhouettes but lose their original materials. Bronze and plaster, both suited to a climate-controlled interior, give way to cast aluminium, a material choice that pushes the collection's overall feel further toward architecture and industrial design and away from the softer, more organic material palette of the studio's indoor work. Garnier and Linker have described the goal for the reworked pieces as something that reads as both raw and refined at once, a fair description of what happens when a decorative object is rebuilt to also function as durable outdoor equipment.
The technical side of that shift was not simple. Each fixture now houses a proprietary, compact power source built specifically for exterior use, a constraint that shaped decisions the studio would not otherwise have had to make on an interior piece, from wall thickness to how the light itself is diffused through the cast metal. According to the studio, the durability requirements imposed by outdoor engineering have already started feeding back into how they approach the indoor collections, treating Aurora less as a side project and more as a testing ground for the whole practice.
Garnier and Linker are positioning Aurora as the opening chapter of a longer outdoor lighting line rather than a one-off seasonal release, with further pieces expected to extend the same cast-aluminium treatment to other parts of the studio's existing catalogue. For a young French lighting house that has built its identity on decorative-arts craftsmanship, moving a chunk of that catalogue outdoors is a real test of whether the sculptural instinct survives outside a controlled room. Full details on the Aurora collection are at Wallpaper, and the studio's wider portfolio is at garnieretlinker.com.
